So I just signed a contract for my first regular, paid freelance writing job. I am living the dream, here, people. Now I need about twenty more of these so I can pay the rent. Ho ho ho. I promise I’ll link it when it’s up, which should be next Friday.

I told my duplex neighbor, who I ran into at the park. She is moving back to Korea at the end of the month, which is giving me a bad case of the Mondays.

“It’s a regular column?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’ll be just like Carrie on Sex in the City!”

And I had to ask myself, is that what women like me want? Do they want to have columns like Carrie on Sex in the City? I have to find out.

Hey, Jerks. I am back from Auction Island. I must have been really horrendously bad to have been banished to that place. Imagine a clusterfuck that you have to fix when it’s already most of the way through. And then imagine being blamed for things, even though you don’t really know what’s going on, despite your best efforts. And then imagine someone else taking credit for all the good parts. To quote the poet laureate of Strongbadia, “It’s over!”

Today I reconciled all the files and fixed the night-of fuck ups. It was pretty fun, actually. The last three hours of the auction flew by. My former in-laws were there and they bought a little knitted sweater for Spawn of SeaFed. Sometimes I really miss them. SeaFed’s father is the closest thing I had to a dad. He congratulated me on the auction as soon as he saw me. Next to Franny, losing my in-laws was the biggest consideration when I decided to get divorced.

I need a massage and someone to carry me around in a litter for about a week. What will actually happen is that I will clean my fucking house, which looks like a garage sale threw up in it. There is stuff everywhere. Sometimes I just want to throw it out and start over with new stuff. When I worked at a record store in the U-District, another clerk there told me that he got into a huge fight with his housemates about cleaning and they threw away all their dishes and started over.

I haven’t thought about that guy in years, so I googled him up. It turns out he’s in Kinski. I don’t know if it’s good or not, as my ears can only detect the exact frequency of ghetto tech.

ANYWAYZ, I’m turning in the final files tomorrow so people can get all billed and stuff.

Today they knocked the house down across the street. I kept running out in the middle of reconciling files to snap an update. It was great timing for Strudel to have something to watch out the picture window because I was so busy all day. I told her they were munching the house up and she said “HUNGRY!” I suppose backhoes are hungry, in a way.

cleek

It’s weird. I’ve been looking at that house every day for more than a year now, and now it’s all rubble. We went crazy nanners digging up rose bushes from the yard yesterday, and now, BAM, instant rose garden. We also got some random stuff like a rhododendron, a peony, and a poppy, and a shitload of spring bulbs. Even if some of the stuff dies, it’s better than watching it all get turned under.

Is that selfish of me to be glad they were knocking a house down so my child would be entertained? She won’t watch a fucking TV, I can tell you that much. A week ago Whippet took me to her waxer’s house, where she does waxing on the side for cheaper, so we could swap off with Strudel and get our hairs yoinked.

I let Whippet go first, because Strudel saw that there were little yap dogs and got really nervous. I had to hold her for a while, and the waxy lady turned on a TV in her living room that was so large it could have eaten your soul. Bert and Ernie were the size of real actual humans. I wanted to have my picture taken in front of it, since it will be a while until I get to Stonehenge. Strudel watched for about thirty seconds in a very WTF sort of way, and then got irritated, because the little yap dogs were mobbing us constantly. I have never seen such pesty little dogs.

And then, of couse, because I was there, the lipstick came out. There should be a law that all little dogs should be fixed. Seriously, the dog’s scrabble bag was the size of ping pong balls. No one needs to see that. At least give him little pants or something, or some pixelization. Finally, he had that horny and determined dog look on his face, so I started using Strudel as a cockblock. He didn’t want her–she smelled kind of funny to me, so I’m sure she smelled terrible to Lotharito.

And then there was the girl dog. She was wearing a little dress, but no pants, so I could see her parts on display, too. I’m all for parts, but man, I don’t care for dog parts. Apparently, the owners are breeding the dogs twice to make their money back.

So they were almost-humping, because she was almost in heat, and they were both tinkling all over the living room, which explained the very doggie smell in there. And it was one of those new-fangled McMansions that stretches out to the very edge of the lot, and has a seven-car garage or something. So, ugly as hell, but brand new. And this is what you do with that? Your little yap dogs tinkle all over the living room?

After they followed me all over the room, touching and pawing me constantly for no reason, I couldn’t take it anymore. I kept scooting them away with my foot and they would come scuttling right back. You just don’t want to boot the dogs of the person who is about to wax you. Especially when the only pictures on the mantel are of the dogs. Other relatives were relegated to the side of the fridge; I looked. I glanced at Strudel, who was up on the counter eating the croissant I brought her. “Homehomehomehomehome!” she said, and pointed at the door. “Good idea, kid,” I said, and lifted her up over the dogs’ baby gate and into the hallway, and out the front door.

Strudel played on the tiny lawn. The air whipping down the canyon of McMansions felt so cool and fresh after the peepee smell of the house. Whippet came out front about fifteen minutes later, and announced it was my turn. “No,” I said. “She’s not going to be able to wait anymore.” We fled. Whippet felt bad about me being her ride, but it was fine, really. You have to expect a certain amount of misadventure sometimes, right?

Bonus:

So, Snoop Dogg got herself a jobby-job. Now I’m no longer the be-afro’d sucka lounging around my house in my pizzle-jammies.

Anyway, I am going to be the Doing Important Stuff Queen at Franny’s school next year. Perhaps you can give me a job title, besides “Person Who Will Have an Awesome Resume When She Is Done Ranching Tiny Boobnibblers.”

I will be:
Webmistress
Student database flogstress
Auction Biotch
Fundraiser
Monthly Screedler
Grantwriter and
Generally Awesome

It’s like I’ll be a Librarian, without any of the actual Librarianing, and all of the important but peripheral stuff they do. I’ll be an Unbrarian. A Unibrowbrarain. Fauxbrarian. Your Lambitarian. YEAH!

The best part is that tuition will be absolutely, completely, stupidly free!!! It’s part time, and the naked feral elf will be at school for three hours a day leaving me time to:

See how many buttons I can swallow!
Write other things!
Zest quinces!
Shave wombats!
TV/VCR Repair!

SCREEM!

Speaking of church signs, I was just thinking about what I was doing last year at this time. I was a temping fool, paying the bills by turning up in a new office every week or two as the administrative assistant du jour.

Right around Fangsgiving last year I was working on First Hill for the Catholic Archdiocese. I was filling in for an admin who was extremely ill. I was enjoying this very much, because I was knocked up by my companion, whom I had just started living with a couple weeks before, and I was still married to my ex-husband. “Hussy” doesn’t even begin to cover it. On my first day, as I was going to lunch, my cel phone rang.

“Hello?”

“SJ?” It was my companion.

“What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing. I just wanted to see if you turned into a pile of smoldering ashes when you crossed the doorway.”

VERY FUNNY, Companion. I was fine, but my pentagram was making my neck burn a little. And I could hear a tiny voice saying “RED RUM” that I think was coming from my crotch, but I couldn’t bend over to check because I was starting to show.

So the woman running the department I was working for had a daughter who was probably nineteen or twenty and attending the nearby Catholic university. The daughter, “Lindsay,” used to make a little money doing filing and such when they got backed up. She was a favorite around the office, because people there had known her since she was a little girl.

On the first day that I came in, the head admin had stepped out and I was greeted by Lindsay. My contact at the temp agency said, “Go business casual, but conservative. It is the Catholic Diocese, after all.” When I walked in, I could see that Lindsay was wearing a miniscule tank top that had L.A.M.B. spelled out across her breasts in those shiny silver fabric dots. Suddenly I felt overdressed in my nice maternity sweater.

She was a nice girl, really, and the rest of the week went well. I really liked the ladies there–the place was full of them. Occasionally I saw the Archbishop floating around in his dress and pope hat.

On one of my last days there, the big project was to prepare for a national audit by a government agency that was reviewing how the Catholic Church was dealing with investigating molestation charges. I was putting together binders for the agency, which I was told was composed of ex-CIA, to review. Lindsay was helping with this project as well, as there was a tight deadline. The second-in-command of the office I worked for was concerned about Lindsay’s chosen outfit that day, which was a strapless tube-style top and a pair of tight capris. “You better hope the archbishop doesn’t see you in that,” she warned Lindsay.

Later that day we were carrying the binders and some paper to a conference room so we could stuff the binders assembly-line style, with lots of room to spread out. As we turned a corner, an apparition in a sparkly dress and pope hat appeared at the end of the hallway–the archbishop. “Oh shit!” muttered the second-in-command. Her arm whipped out, shoving Lindsay into a nearby copy room and closing the door. We continued on our way down the hall and passed by the archbishop who was walking toward us while in deep conversation with his assistant. “Hello, Archbishop,” we said as we passed them.

Lindsay was rescued a few minutes later, after the archbishop had moved to another part of the building.

I’m tired of jobs startin off at five fifty an hour
Then this boss wonders why I’m smartin off
I’m tired of being fired everytime I fart and cough
Tired of having to work as a gas station clerk
for this jerk breathing down my neck driving me bezerk
I’m tired of using plastic silverware
Tired of working in Builders Square
Tired of not being a millionaire

–“If I Had,” Eminem

Well, last week I was on a tear because of the whole library employment situation in Seattle. I guess I should say it’s a non-situation, because one local system has been in a hiring freeze for over a year now, and the other system has something satanic and soul-destroying called a “hiring pool,” which they developed right before my class graduated last year (’04). As an aside, some employees were so digruntled with the new pool process, they are suing the library system.

The hiring pool works like this: you apply to be in the pool. It’s a standard government/city application–reference check, essays, and so on. If they like what they see on your resume, then they call you and do a phone interview. If you pass that screening, then you go on to three to five more interviews. The first two are one-on-one interviews, an hour apiece. Then there is a “skills assessment” where they judge your people/customer service skills. There are then two more optional interviews, one for the Youth Services pool and another for the Children’s Services pool. If you pass all that, then congratulations! You may now, after six interviews totaling about three-and-a-half hours (not including prep, travel, and time off work, of course), sit in the pool for an indeterminate amount of time!

I love this quote from the article I linked above, regarding the lawsuit. “[Charlene] Richards said the pool was created to streamline the hiring process for the library system.” (Charlene Richards is the HR manager for the system.) This must be a new meaning of the word “steamline” of which I was not aware.

AND THEN, if you are “lucky,” like my companion, you will obtain a very high pool score, which puts you at the top of the list to get called for every librarian opening. HOWEVER, (here’s the hitch) you will interview against five other people, half of whom are usually internal applicants. Who have experience in the system as substitutes, or are full-on librarians who are trying to transfer to another branch because of location or more hours. There are a lot of twenty- and thirty-hour positions, and people are often trying to get up to the coveted forty-hour job.

I have lost track, but in my estimation, since my companion entered the pool in October of 2004, he has had about fifteen interviews at the branches. He says that a lot of the time the librarians feel kind of bad and they will overtly tell him they have internal applicants, and HR has said the same thing, which means “don’t get your hopes up,” of course.

Recently, as I have mentioned, he was offered a temporary substitute position through the library, in an undesirable location, which would have run through December. He was about to take it when he discovered that his boss at the giant local software company he is contracting for badly wanted to keep him and increased his salary, beating the pants off the standard Librarian I salary he was offered for the temporary position.

So my companion has turned his back on the library world. On Sunday night we had two friends over for dinner from graduate school. One is an academic librarian, and the other is a public librarian. In fact, the public librarian is the one who told us that my companion was considered “too iSchool” for the branch he interviewed for. I asked her what she thought the interviewing librarian meant when she said that.

“Well,” our friend said, “our graduate program has a bad reputation. The librarians’ perceptions are that we don’t learn anything worthwhile in the program. They want to see real world experience.” Again, I have to say that my companion has student librarian experience, and has worked in libraries prior to graduate school as a non-professional. Our academic librarian friend interjected that our program was helpful to her in her job search, because her interviewers did want to hear about her thoughts regarding academic/information theory, pedagogy, etc, which makes sense because she is working in an academic environment and expected to teach and do research. (Halo, step in here if I am slaughtering what you meant.) I also know quite a few people who went through our program and slid right back into the business world whence they came. So perhaps our program is less helpful for public librarians, especially greener ones.

The catch, however, as is the case with many professional fields, is that you can’t become a public librarian unless you have the training and the degree, but then it’s hard to break in if you don’t have a ton of experience, which you can’t get beyond lower-level paraprofessional experience because you don’t have the degree. Rinse, repeat, bang head against wall. With a few exceptions, the public librarians I have seen hired after graduation have had student experience with the system they applied to as graduating professionals.

But my companion is the last person in the world to lie in a puddle feeling sorry for himself, so now he puts his damn pants on every morning and is project managing the hell out of his project. And now he has PM experience, which means he should be able to nab that next PM contract that comes down the pike. The upshot to this is that I don’t need to find a job for the time being, and I think we can even pay on our student loans when they come due next year. Medium pimpin’ feels pretty good after being so far away from any kind of pimpin’ at all that the pimp club was just a tiny, blingy dot off in the horizon.

So now it doesn’t matter if my companion did not have enough student experience, didn’t know the right people, was too techie, had too much indexing experience, or was pushing water uphill by trying to become a children’s librarian…with a penis (shh). These are all theories I’ve heard over the past year. It’s too bad for our local library that they are losing someone so talented, enthusiastic, and dedicated. And it’s been sad watching his dream slowly get squashed over the past year. But, as we have come to realize, the best thing we have gotten out of grad school was each other.

And now I can be an Asshole, and tell my favorite librarian joke:

What’s the difference between a large pizza and a librarian?

A large pizza can feed a family of four!

Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here until I get sued for libel.

I have really tried to dial it down on any posting related to librarianship, especially since this fiasco, when some nutbar decided she couldn’t deal with my idea of satire and tried to start a smear campaign on her blog. Plus, I am not working in the field right now, so Library Thots aren’t exactly tumbling out of me. But I have to tell you about something that happened recently.

So, many of my informationally-abled friends have been passing around the link to this article, which is about how hard it is to find the first post-MLIS job. It’s a good article–thoughtful, well-written, and the author isn’t whining in any way, which I have to admit is SUPER TEMPTING. I will be whining myself later.

The gist of the article is that a library job-seeker may never know how they landed the job they end up with, because the odds are pretty freakin stacked against us right now. “Waves of librarian retirement” that we were promised in grad school? Not happening. Budgets continue to be cut. That deluxe chunk of robot poop downtown that passes for a library is great and all, but the main library cut back their hours upon opening it, and instituted a hiring freeze shortly after we graduated last year.

But if you know someone In The System, then you may actually know why you got passed over for a certain job. A friend in the system ran into a woman who passed up my companion for a job at a branch a few weeks ago. “We liked him,” she said, “but he was too iSchool.” (She was referring to the University of Washington’s library and information science program, which is where we were trained.)

Here is the MLIS program’s “mission statement.” In a nutshell, they are user/patron-focused, are concerned with the “life” or behavior of information, and integrate a fair amount of technology education into the program. It is a diverse degree, and people go on to many different occupations in the realm of information and librarianship. Without going into it here, I will say it is a flawed program, but if you combine the theory and classroom work with student work in the field, you have a solid start and a degree that legally certifies you to call yourself a big-L Librarian.

So for this librarian to say to our friend that my companion is “too iSchool”…I was shocked. He is being punished now for paying thousands of dollars to be professionally trained as a librarian at a modern information school. Guess what, lady? They’re not offering us classes in due date stamping anymore, and try as I might I could not find one class on the care and feeding of card catalogues. This is how librarians are being trained now. She may clue into that at some point, months or years from now, but my companion will be working elsewhere by then. I had heard rumors about “traditional” librarians (whatever that means) being disinclined to hire people who are techie, and now I’m starting to believe it. Because you know how to program you can’t talk to patrons?

For the past few months, my companion has been a contractor at a large local software company. He is being underpaid and is doing much more than he was hired for, but his techie skills are keeping a roof over our heads. He is also designing websites in his spare time. This is a man who did not even have an email address until the amazing year 2002. He wants to be a librarian, at a public library, but his enthusiasm started flagging around the time he got his fifteenth rejection letter from the same library system in the mail. He has one of the highest ratings in the hiring pool, but he continues to be not quite right…or too iSchool, I guess.

They are missing out on someone who understands how both the back end (technology) as well as the front end (people) of a library works. Someone else is going to snap him up soon, I’m sure. If my companion wasn’t so “iSchool”…if all he could be was a librarian…I’d be standing in line downtown for food stamps right now. FUCK YOU.

In Other NEWS!

Every night for the past three nights I have been awakened, sometimes more than once, by my kid with her face all covered with blood. Frannie is prone to nosebleeds in the winter, but it’s been especially bad lately. This apartment gets bone dry in cool weather, so I’m going to have to do something. I think we are going to try buying a humidifier today, because I can’t be awakened by bloodbath-a-go-go again. YEEG.

Did you read this, Mom? All those nights I woke you up after carpeting myself head-to-toe in vomit…revenge is yours. I don’t know where it can go from here. Maybe Franny’s future child will pee out of her eye corners or something.

Poor Frannie! She has a lot of nose anxiety, whereas I used my nose to make other people anxious. I discovered at age eight that I could fit Crayola markers up my nose, which would make my babysitters cringe. When I was a few years older than Frannie I used to bump rails of unsweetened Kool-Aid so I could sneeze purple and green on other kids at the bus stop. I also used to spend a lot of time alone, wondering why I didn’t have any friends. I am starting to think these two things may be related.

UPDATE! 9/28

No nosebleeds last night, and the humidifier put her right to sleep. She said she felt better in the morning, too. It can get awfully dry here considering this is a “temperate rainforest.”

“And make no mistake, my friend
Your pointless life will end
But before you go
Can you look at the truth?
You have a lovely singing voice
A lovely singing voice”

–Steven Patrick Morrissey

So, remember that job that I was telling you about, that job that they had only previously hired men to do? Well, I got it. I am sorting donations at a local thrift store. It is hard and brainless work, but not necessarily work you would need a man to do. In fact, I would say that women would be better suited to it, because women are generally less-squeamish about the stuff I keep encountering, or at least less immature. On Sunday someone donated a pack of adult diapers. I have had two babies “via hoo-hoo” as they say in medical parlance, and I realize that I am probably looking down the barrel of wetting myself someday. It happens. But there was an awful lot of “hur hur hur-ing” when they discovered the diapers.

Some stuff is pretty hur-worthy, though. Last night we discovered a “light bondage kit,” which included a tiny whip, some leather pasties with a tube of glue with which to attach the pasties, and “erotic oils.” Whenever the guys find stuff like this there is a lot of elbowing and snickering and a few of them will glance at me, to see what my reaction is going to be. But I am pretty unflappable, as you may guess. They were debating about where to put the kit when I chimed in. “Housewares, definitely housewares.” A more sensible guy I work with stepped in and said we just couldn’t sell things like that and took it away to pitch out.

Yesterday was a Special Bonus Day, because we also found a vibrator, too, one of the classic “tube” kinds that take batteries and have a screw-on base. “It came with its own little bag,” said the young guy who found it. “I hope it won’t be missed,” I said. This time we could file it under “housewares” for the pricers to find, because our man the voice of reason wasn’t around.

This job is different than I thought it was going to be. Can I tell you I have never made minimum wage, even before I had my degrees? And now I am. I have always somehow done at least a dollar or so better, even as a punk kid. Last summer I was doing contract writing for $18 an hour, and now I am making less than half that. But we are so scraping by here that even this crappy job will make a difference.

Another thing that surprised me about this job is how it is having an immediate emotional impact on me. I think I am having some hormonally-induced mood swings from being away from Strudel for so many hours, but seeing all this stuff is also screwing with me, too. Sometimes I open a bag and realize that I am seeing someone’s entire shoe collection, I can just tell. Which they won’t need anymore. Because they are dead. It makes me think about the mental state of the person who had to gather up all those shoes and make the decision to bring them to the store. Was it their mother’s shoes? Was it a person who volunteered to do it because everyone else was too bereaved? Were they perhaps saying, “Hooray! The old bat’s dead, now I can help myself to her Kandinsky prints!”

Or I open a box and see a cross-section of someone’s clothes and items that look exactly like stuff that an old friend I lost touch with would have worn and liked. Or I find a collection that looks like stuff you would take to a lover’s house to make your stay there more comfortable. You know, for “your” drawer. And then one day it goes badly and you break up, and then you take their comb and stupid CDs and cardigan to the thrift store, because you don’t want to think about their ass anymore.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I am being affected by other peoples’ memories.

Also, the sheer amount of stuff we get in…Christ. I think every time I work we fill up about three Dumpster-sized bins with clothes alone. And I don’t go out to the front much, but it seems to blast right out the door again. I have long boggled over the facts and figures about how much we in Western “developed” countries own and consume, but now I think that we could probably stop making stuff for about ten years and this country would still have nice, suitable crap circulating. For me, thrifting started as a fashionable thing, when I was in high school and had a lot of money to blow. And in Illinois holy shit, people will not touch western wear with a ten-foot lassoo, so, hey, more for me. Later, in college, it became a matter of economics and I only shopped new when I had to. Now it is starting to seem like a responsible political choice. I never thought I would become one of THOSE people, but there I am facing down a pile of decent (and not-so-decent) clothes, some of which still have the tags on them, that is three times as tall as I am, every time I go to work. Holy shit.

The downside, other than the fact that it is actual work, ugh, is all the detritus, tangible and airborne, that comes in with donations. There is a copious amount of dust and mold, of course, but there is always a bunch of fiddly crap we can’t do a thing with. Broken stuff, odd plastic or metal parts that don’t appear to match anything and aren’t really even recognizable. A coworker ran across a used tampon. An appliance that looks good, except for the fact that it is filthy, such as the George Foreman grill that came in on Sunday covered with burger schmutz. Stuffed animals with dried puke on them, bedraggled and dirty. We all know that a lot of people seem to be just trying to avoid making dump runs. We probably throw out about one-third of the stuff we’re getting.

Another sort-of downside to this is that the satellite radio station is almost always set to ’80s mix. So I am hearing the catchy-ass stuff that was on the radio when I was a kid. It’s fun to sing along but last night, when I was rocking out to “Living on a Prayer” I realized that that bad, awful Bon Jovi Song has become my life. And when a schmaltzy Bon Jovi song could be “your” song, it’s time to change your life.

Well, it’s a living, sort of, until we can save up to move to a cheaper part of the city.

My sister came over yesterday and watched the girls while I had another job interview. I had been applying for “good” jobs (tech writing/editing, etc.) that offer telecommuting, part-time, or odd hours and got no bites, so now I am applying for anything that has an opening posted. I am now leaving my Master’s degree off of everything. I am filling out applications that say things like, “Fill in you’re availability hear.” It makes me want to stop and say, “look, can you just hire me to edit your forms?”

Yes, I will be your dog washer / chick sexer / flenser. There is no point in lamenting about whether or not the job market in Seattle sucks or if I do, the fact is that I have to get a job and have not gotten one yet. I think I have one, after yesterday’s interview, but I am not holding my breath, even after having an interview and hearing the woman say, “you’ve got the job.” (I’ve heard that one before.) Apparently my background check hasn’t come back yet, and I haven’t been scheduled for the required UA, so I suppose they could change their minds. Or, next week at this time I could have a job that “we’ve never hired a woman to do before, but we’d like to try something new.” Ay yi yi. Details will follow, I hope.

Anything would be better than working for this espresso place in the University District, Sureshot Espresso. I was a barista in college so I thought it was worth a try to apply to be a coffee jerk again. Before job hunting recently, I had gone into Sureshot twice and had been ignored by the counter help for a significant amount of time, and so had walked out again. On a desperate lark, I picked up an application there and asked if they were hiring. For once, the barista there was friendly.

“Yes, but you have to come in on a particular day, because the owners will want you to turn the application in to them personally,” he said. That’s weird, I thought.

As I started to read the application it got weirder. The first part of the application is pretty normal, but at the very top of the application is a small box where one is required to sign a declaration: “I understand that Sureshot is a non-smoking establishment.” Then you have to check a box, just like in grade school when you get one of those “Do you like me? Yes or no” notes. The applicant must declare “I certify that I am a non-smoker” or “I am a smoker, but I will not smoke during my shifts.” Can they tell you what you can do during your breaks, as long as you are engaged in a legal activity?

The second half of the application is a riot: date of birth, marital status, number of years married, number of dependents, have you had any serious illnesses in the past five years. They even want to know if you own or share a car. I imagine the interview involves them looking at your teeth, knocking on your flanks, and administering a psychological test.

I had long been told that these sorts of questions are illegal, and I wondered if it was true. I wondered if there was a watchdog organization online for employers like this. I googled around and what I discovered is that these questions are not illegal, per se, it is just deeply, deeply stupid to ask them, because a person who doesn’t get the job could feel that they were being unfairly discriminated against and sue. Applicants are not required to answer such personal questions, but who would hire someone who fills out half the app, and then starts talking about personal rights? None of the fuckasses I worked for during college and high school. And what employee would want to work in such a hostile environment?

Of course, a lawsuit less likely to happen with a single-location, hole-in-the-wall espresso joint exploiting ignorant eighteen-year-olds, as opposed to a large corporation that has millions of dollars and is hiring for jobs where an employee has a lot to gain, such as a livable wage.

In the end, though, I decided I liked Sureshot’s application very much, because most applications won’t give you that much of a red flag about the management. “Things can only get worse,” it says.